Anthropic

Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom was OpenAI's Vice President of Research. They raised $124 million in May 2021. In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not immediately release it, citing a need for further internal safety testing and a desire to avoid initiating a potentially hazardous race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems. It was released in March 2023.

In 2024, Anthropic hired several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike and John Schulman. In May 2025, the company announced Claude 4. It also introduced new API capabilities, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector. The company hosted its inaugural developer conference that month. Also in May, Anthropic launched a web search API that enables Claude to access real-time information from the internet. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant, transitioned from research preview to general availability.

In July 2025, Anthropic signed a two-year contract with the US Department of Defense for $200 million. Anthropic LLMs became integrated with the Pentagon's classified intelligence networks and with Palantir's data platform. Anthropic stipulated that the Pentagon not use its technologies for mass surveillance of Americans, or to create fully autonomous weapons. Amodei clarified that Anthropic supports the use of AI in "lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions" and partially autonomous weapons, such as those used in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

In September 2025, Anthropic announced that it would stop selling its products to groups majority-owned by Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or North Korean entities due to national security concerns. In October 2025, Anthropic announced a cloud partnership with Google, giving it access to up to one million of Google's custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), potentially adding more than one gigawatt of AI compute capacity by 2026. …

According to Anthropic, its goal is to research AI systems' safety and reliability. The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences. Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation. In January 2026, Anthropic introduced a division called "Labs", with Mike Krieger, formerly the company's Chief Product Officer, joining it. In March 2026, Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute, a think tank studying AI led by Jack Clark.

Anthropic's flagship product line is the "Claude" series of large language models, which some employees consider a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon. One of the techniques used to fine-tune Claude models is called "constitutional AI", in which the LLM is trained to adhere to a set of principles called a constitution. The company makes the models available via a web interface, an API, Amazon Bedrock, an iOS app, and Mac and Windows desktop apps.

Claude Code is a command-line AI agent designed for coding. "Cowork" is an equivalent with a graphical user interface, intended to be simpler to use. While Claude Code is tailored toward developers, Cowork is designed for non-technical users, enabling them to automate file and task management (including reading, editing and writing new files) without requiring programming knowledge.

With the advent of Claude Code, vibe coding, a programming approach in which users describe desired outcomes in natural language and let an AI agent write the code, became increasingly popular. The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and rapidly gained popularity as AI coding tools became more ubiquitous.

Claude's first two versions, Claude and Claude Instant, were released in March 2023, but only Anthropic-approved users could use them. The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched to the public in July 2023. In March 2024, Anthropic released three language models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku, in decreasing order of performance. In June 2024, it released Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In May 2025, Anthropic released Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet. In February 2026, it released Claude Opus 4.6, followed by Sonnet 4.6. In April 2026, Anthropic announced Mythos. Opus 5.5 was unveiled on September 22, 2026, which they say is comparable to their top-tier Fable 5.1 while costing 40% less.

In April 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding, including a $500 million investment from FTX under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried. In September 2023, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic. Amazon became a minority stakeholder by initially investing $1.25 billion and planning a total investment of $4 billion. The remaining $2.75 billion was invested in March 2024. In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion, doubling its total investment. As part of the deal, Anthropic uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and makes its AI models available to AWS customers.

In October 2023, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time. In March 2025, Google agreed to invest another $1 billion in Anthropic. Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round in March 2025, achieving a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation by several major investors. In September 2025, Anthropic completed a Series F funding round, raising $13 billion at a post-money valuation of $183 billion. The round was co-led by Iconiq Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation by the Qatar Investment Authority and other investors. On 31 December 2025, it was confirmed that Anthropic had signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round led by Coatue and GIC, at a $350 billion valuation. On February 12, 2026, Anthropic announced that it had raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $380 billion. In May 2026, Anthropic announced it had raised $65 billion of investment from multiple investors, including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Sequoia Capital. The investment round valued the company at $965 billion.

In May 2026, Anthropic, in collaboration with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and others, created Ode, an AI services company focused on the integration of AI into companies.

In November 2024, Anthropic partnered with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to provide the Claude model to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. In June 2025, Anthropic announced a "Claude Gov" model. Ars Technica reported that as of June 2025, it was in use at multiple U.S. national security agencies. As of February 2026, Anthropic's partnership with Palantir makes Claude the only AI model used in classified missions. In July 2025, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced that Anthropic had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Google, OpenAI, and xAI.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. military used Claude in its 2026 raid on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro. Exactly how Claude was used is unknown. The intervention resulted in the deaths of 83 people. Anthropic's usage policy prohibits directly using Claude for domestic surveillance or in fully autonomous weapons. White House officials said that these restrictions prevented federal contractors working with the FBI and Secret Service from using it. Tension regarding this policy has arisen with The Pentagon and the Trump administration.

On February 24, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to cut Anthropic out of the DoD supply chain by February 27 if Anthropic did not permit unrestricted use of Claude, or he would invoke the Defense Production Act to assert unrestricted use without an agreement. On February 26, Anthropic rejected the Pentagon's demands to drop AI safeguards. On February 27, after the deadline, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. government agencies to stop using models developed by Anthropic. The action was described as retaliatory.

Two days later, it was reported that the US military had used Claude via Palantir's Maven Smart System during its attacks on Iran at the outset of the 2026 Iran war. It was later announced that the Pentagon was investigating whether Claude played a role in the U.S. strike on the Iranian girls' school that killed more than 170 people, mostly children. On March 5, the Pentagon officially deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, a decision the company said it saw "no choice but to challenge ... in court". In March, leaders from Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft supported Anthropic's lawsuit against the DoD. …